Barbara Ruddy, one of the Savannah Music Festival's biggest cheerleaders, has talked to me several times about how music can break down barriers between people.

And how music can be a bridge across "the three C's" - color, class and creed.

Ruddy should know. She and her husband, Michael, have been all over the world, including a long stint working in Africa.

Well, Ruddy might be the festival's "spunkiest board member" - as director Rob Gibson said Sunday night in his introduction to the glorious performance of cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han - but she's certainly not alone in seeing the festival as a way to make Savannah a more cohesive community.

For years now, the festival has offered diverse programming from the great musical traditions of America and the rest of the world.

But the audiences did not always reflect the diversity of the performers themselves.

So over the past year the festival has worked hard to broaden the audience base to include more blacks, more young adults and more ethnic minorities.

And those are just two of the practical steps the festival took to broaden its base.

Those efforts are clearly paying off.

That's good news for the festival's bottom line, of course, but it's even better news for the city.

I attended six festival events between Thursday and Sunday (hey, it's a tough job but someone has to do it) and I was repeatedly struck by the diversity of the attendees.

Folks from the local Indian community turned out in big numbers for Anoushka Shankar, but so did a lot of college-age "kids."

So did the generation who were turned onto the sitar by Anoushka's father Ravi.

Largely thanks to the festival's outreach to the Hispanic Outreach and Leadership at Armstrong Atlantic State University, Saturday's late show by Plena Libre truly became the Latin Dance Party that it was advertised as. Wow, what fun.

There's also a growing cadre of core festival supporters who trust Gibson's programming implicitly and will turn out for just about anything on the festival schedule.

Of course, the big draw this past weekend was Wynton Marsalis, who sold out Johnny Mercer Theater.

(After the show, by the way, the gracious Marsalis dropped by Orleans Hall to listen for a bit to Plena Libre.)

Earlier in the day, Marsalis spent more than an hour at the ceremony dedicating a plaque to the jazz great King Oliver, who died in Savannah in 1938.

The event was co-sponsored by the festival and the Friends of King Oliver.

On the patio adjacent to the restaurant 514 West on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the soft-spoken Marsalis talked passionately about the need to connect the young and the old, the past and the present.

Marsalis spoke of "the democratic principles" of self-respect and freedom of expression inherent in the work of early jazz musicians.

After the unveiling, Marsalis lingered for quite some time talking to a group of older jazz men who had performed on West Broad Street decades ago.

But the gathering wasn't just a stroll down memory lane. In his brief remarks to the 125 or so who showed up for the dedication, developer Walter Evans was greeted with spontaneous applause when he suggested that the corridor could have a future as vibrant as its past.

And that was just one of many times last weekend when Ruddy's idea about music bridging the "three C's" seemed to be right on the mark.